Every summer I get some version of the same question from a parent standing courtside at Potter Park: “He wants to play more, but who does he play with?”
It’s a fair question, and it’s more important than it sounds. I’m Michael Boothman — I’ve coached in Sarasota for over 30 years, and I can tell you that the juniors who improve fastest between lessons are almost never the ones with the most private hours. They’re the ones who found somebody to hit with on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody was watching.
Lessons are where you build the skill. A hitting partner is where you find out whether you actually have it.
Why this matters more than another lesson
One of the six pillars I coach from is Live Ball Is the Method — the idea that real skill is built inside real rallies, against a ball that a human being actually hit, with all the variation and imperfection that implies. A ball machine sends the same ball to the same place at the same speed. That’s useful for maybe fifteen minutes. It is not tennis.
A hitting partner gives you what a machine never will: a ball that arrives slightly wrong. Short when you expected deep. Sliced when you expected topspin. Rushed because they were out of position. Reading and adjusting to that variation is the skill. You can’t drill it in isolation; you have to live in it.
So a junior with two lessons a week and no hitting partner is getting maybe three hours of live ball. A junior with one lesson and two standing hits with a friend is getting four or five — and the extra hours are the messy, unscripted kind that transfer best to a match. The math favors the second kid, and so does the research.
Where to actually look in Sarasota
Your own group. This is the most overlooked answer and the easiest one. If your child trains in a small group, they already know three to five players within a reasonable level range who live nearby and are demonstrably available at the time your child trains. Parents in the same group are solving the same problem you are. Somebody just has to say it out loud first.
Public park courts, at the right hours. Sarasota’s public courts are genuinely good, and they’re where the community actually is. The trick is timing — mid-morning and late afternoon in summer, you’ll find juniors and adults hitting. Show up twice at the same time on the same day and you’ll start recognizing faces. That’s how most hitting partnerships in this town have ever started: proximity plus repetition.
School teams, in the offseason. If your child plays for a middle or high school team, that roster is a ready-made list of players at a known level who are looking for offseason hitting. The season ends and everybody scatters — for no reason other than nobody organized anything.
USTA junior events. Even if your child isn’t chasing a ranking, local tournaments are full of players in the same age and level bracket, standing around between matches. You can find sanctioned Florida junior events through the USTA’s tournament search. Half the value of a first tournament is the phone numbers.
How to ask without it being weird
Juniors are often more nervous about this than the tennis. So make it small and specific.
Not: “Do you want to hit sometime?” That’s a question with no answer. Sometime never arrives.
Instead: “Are you free Thursday at 4 at Potter Park for an hour?” A day, a time, a place, a duration. It’s easy to say yes to and easy to say no to, which is exactly what makes it easy to ask.
And if the answer is no, ask the next person. This is a numbers game and always has been.
What makes a partnership stick
I’ve watched a lot of these form and dissolve over the years. The ones that last tend to share three things.
A standing time. “We’ll figure it out each week” means it dies in three weeks. “Tuesdays and Thursdays at four” survives. Put it in the calendar like it’s a lesson, because functionally it is.
A rough level match — but not a perfect one. The partner doesn’t need to be your child’s exact level. They need to be close enough that rallies actually happen. A player who’s a little better is the single best thing that can happen to a developing junior; a player who’s a little worse teaches patience and control. What kills it is when one player can’t get a ball back — then nobody’s rallying and both kids are bored.
A plan, even a loose one. Two juniors on a court with no plan will hit crosscourt forehands for forty-five minutes and call it practice. Give them something to do: ten minutes of crosscourt, then first one to seven with every point starting from a serve. Then switch. The structure doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It needs to exist.
That last one is where parents can help most, and it’s the least intrusive kind of help there is. You’re not coaching. You’re just making sure the hour has a shape.
One thing to leave them alone about
Here’s my honest advice, and it runs against the instinct: once your child has a hitting partner and a standing time, get out of the way.
Don’t watch every session. Don’t debrief it in the car. Don’t ask who won. The whole value of a hitting partner is that it’s theirs — unsupervised, unevaluated, low-stakes reps where a kid can try the thing they’re bad at without an audience. That’s where players get brave enough to hit a second serve with actual spin on it, or come to net when they’re not sure. They will not try those things in front of you, and they definitely won’t try them in a match first.
The lesson is where the coaching happens. The hitting session is where the kid finds out what they can do. Both matter. They’re not the same thing, and treating the second like a supervised extension of the first is the fastest way to ruin it.
Start this week
If your child trains with us, they already know their hitting partner — they just haven’t asked yet. Nudge them to ask one person, for one specific hour, this week. That’s the whole assignment.
You can read more about how we approach junior development in Sarasota on the coaching page, or reach me directly at michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703.
The summer’s got a couple weeks left in it. Two kids and an hour on a public court is still the best deal in tennis.
— Michael Boothman